The $3,500 Question: Why I Pay Publishers to Give Away My Own Research

Imagine spending hundreds of hours on a research project, writing it up, getting it through the gruelling peer review process—and then being told you have to pay $3,500 so that others can read it. I've paid fees like this to ensure my research could be read by anyone. But what about research papers where authors can't afford it? They sit behind paywalls where readers must pay over $30 just to read a single article.

For that same $30, you could get a month of Netflix, Spotify, AND Disney+—access to virtually all the movies, music, and shows you could imagine. But for academic knowledge? That $30 gets you one article. Just one. And you can't even know how useful it'll be for you.

Somewhere in the world, some super smart person, motivated, bright and curious, the next Marie Curie in the making, sits at a computer, and can't develop her breakthrough intervention. She can't read the research that could spark her groundbreaking discovery. Not because the knowledge doesn't exist, but because she can't afford $30 per paper to access what taxpayers already paid to create. This is academic publishing's dirty secret: somehow, scientific knowledge that should be openly available to anyone, turned into a luxury good.

This is the reality of scientific knowledge production and academic publishing today. Research work, typically funded by taxpayer money and reviewed by volunteer academics (themselves oftentimes funded by taxpayers) becomes the exclusive property of commercial publishers. Deutsche Bank analysts captured this absurdity perfectly, calling it a "bizarre triple-pay system" where “The industry structure can only be described as bizarre - the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research (in peer review processes), and then buys most of the published product.”^1.

The academic publishing industry has become one of the most profitable businesses on Earth, with major publishers reporting profit margins similar to those reported by tech giants like Google and Microsoft. One industry analysis characterized academic publishers “the “most ruthless Capitalists in the Western world” that would make “Rupert Murdoch look like a Socialist”^2. Meanwhile, universities pay millions annually just to access knowledge their own faculty created.

How has it come to this? In the 1960s-70s, academic societies outsourced journal production to commercial publishers to handle printing and distribution logistics. By the time when publishing went digital in the 1990s, these logistical challenges (printing and distribution) had disappeared, but a handful of publishers controlled a large part of the research output. What began as a practical partnership became a stranglehold^3.

How Academic Publishing Actually Works

Why is that? To understand, let's see how scientific knowledge production actually works - and importantly, when and how academic publishers enter the process.

The Research Phase

Academics spend years working on research projects, typically funded by taxpayers through government grants. In my field of experimental social psychology, papers routinely include six, seven, or even nine studies, each requiring hundreds of participants. Our own paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology included seven studies with data from more than 2,500 participants^4. Our research was not fully funded by taxpayer's money, but most research is.

The Peer Review Process

Once a paper has been submitted to a journal, the peer-review process is handled by academics, again doing this kind of work for free, as part of their 'service to the field'. An editor (whose full-time job is to be a regular professor paid by their university) finds three expert reviewers who spend days critiquing the paper—what colleagues of mine estimate as a billion-dollar donation of free labor annually^5. Rejection rates hover around 90-95% for top journals—Nature reports a 92% rejection rate^6.

The Money Shot Moment

Here's where publishers perform their magic trick. The moment a journal editor accepts a paper, publishers transform the final Word document into a formatted pdf, with the journal’s logo and some other minor edits and now suddenly own the copyright forever. It's the perfect value capture: accepting knowledge from academics, re-packaging it slightly, and then selling it back to them again. Academic publishers contribute almost nothing to the research process, but completely control access to the final paper. They're like the perfect toll collectors on the bridge of human knowledge: a bridge they didn't build, don't maintain, and do not own, but control access to.

All the actual work was done by academics. But now publishers can charge $30-50 per article. I literally could not read my own published articles once they were published, because my institution had not paid for a particular journal subscription.

Who Benefits From This System?

Understanding this system requires mapping out who's involved and what they actually want (see Table 1).

Table 1. What Each Stakeholder Wants—and What They Actually Get

Notice the pattern? Academics, universities, and the public all want the same thing: knowledge to be shared widely. Only publishers benefit from restricting access (see Table 2).

Table 2. Who wants free and open access to research, and who profits from restricting it?

The True Cost: Lost Einsteins and Medical Tragedies

Most scientific knowledge remains locked away behind costly paywalls, forcing everyone to pay, and making academic publishers rich. This isn't just an inconvenience—it's a tragedy with real consequences:

• Doctors in rural hospitals can't access the latest dengue fever protocols that might save lives in her ward
• Parents of children with rare genetic disorders are locked out of research papers about their own children's condition
• Graduate students in Kenya, Germany, Australia, or Bangladesh hit paywalls for foundational papers they need to build on

Raj Chetty's research on "Lost Einsteins" found that children from low-income families are far less likely to become inventors—not due to lack of ability, but because they lack exposure^7. Paywalls to scientific knowledge likely have a similar effect by blocking scientific talent from accessing foundational knowledge.

We're creating a two-tier system where only elite institutions can offer comprehensive access. That brilliant student at a community college or university in a developing country? She might have the ability to cure cancer, but she'll never develop it without reading the foundational research.

A System Finally Breaking Apart

This system is increasingly perceived as unsustainable. Since 2023, over 40 editorial boards have resigned en masse^8. The entire editorial board of NeuroImage walked out over Elsevier's $3,450 article processing charges, launching a competing nonprofit journal (Imaging Neuroscience)^9.

Meanwhile, publishers report billion-dollar revenues, and have signed AI licensing deals worth tens of millions—selling access to researchers' work to train commercial AI systems without author consent or compensation. Taylor & Francis earned $75 million from such deals in 2024 alone^10.

Three Models for a Future of Free Research

Despite entrenched publisher power, alternatives are emerging:

1. The PNAS Model: Time-Limited Paywalls

When I published a paper^11 in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), I discovered their innovative model: pay $5,495 for immediate open access, or wait 6 months and the paper becomes free automatically. It's like copyright expiration for academic work, recognizing that publicly funded knowledge shouldn't be locked away forever.

2. Diamond Open Access: Free for Everyone

Over 29,000 journals now operate on a "diamond" model—free for both authors and readers, typically funded by institutions or societies^12. They prove quality publishing doesn't require massive profits. These journals operate on budgets of $500-1,500 per article compared to commercial publishers' $3,000-5,000.

3. Preprint Revolution: Immediate Sharing

Preprint servers like bioRxiv let researchers share findings immediately. The Gates Foundation now requires all funded research to be posted as preprints, refusing to pay any publisher fees—a model other funders are watching closely^13. Since 2019, Plan S requires immediate open access for research from 27 major funders representing over €8.8 billion in research grants annually^14.

Why This Matters for You

This system is creating artificial scarcity in an age of digital abundance, where copying a PDF costs nothing, but accessing it costs more than a month of streaming services.

When you hit a paywall, remember: the authors who wrote that paper want you to read it for free. But then, academic publishers cleverly inserted themselves between researchers and readers, extracting billions while contributing very little.

So now you know why that paywall exists. It's not protecting the researcher who wrote the paper—they want you to read it. It's not funding the peer reviewers—they worked for free. It's feeding a multi-billion dollar industry that contributes very little to science, but has strong incentives to keep up these barriers.

The next time you hit a paywall, remember: you're not being denied access because the knowledge is precious. You're being denied because withholding it is profitable (for academic publishers).

Want some advice on how to (legally) access research that’s behind paywalls? [Read my practical guide here]

References

1. Klein, S. (2019). Turning the supertanker: Deutsche Bank on Elsevier’s excess. KF Notes. <https://notes.knowledgefutures.org/pub/supertanker>
2. Monbiot, G. (2011, August 29). Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist. The Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist>
3. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0127502. <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502>
4. Schaerer, M., Schweinsberg, M., & Swaab, R. I. (2018). Imaginary alternatives: The effects of mental simulation on powerless negotiators. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(1), 96–117. <https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspi0000129>
5. Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., & Holcombe, A. O. (2021). A billion-dollar donation: Estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review. Research Integrity and Peer Review , 6(1), 14. <https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2>
6. Nature. (2025). Editorial criteria and processes at Nature. <https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/editorial-criteria-and-processes>
7. Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaravel, X., Petkova, N., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(2), 647–713. <https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy028>
8. Retraction Watch. (2023, September 28). The retraction watch mass resignations list. Retraction Watch. <https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-mass-resignations-list/>
9. Bell, E. C., Huang, K., & Montgomery, L. (2025, March 24). Academic publishing is a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s not always good for science. The Conversation. <http://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibillion-dollar-industry-its-not-always-good-for-science-250056>
10. Meley, C. (2025, June 10). Academic publishers sign AI deals as Trump cuts research funding. Bloomberg. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-10/academic-publishers-sign-ai-deals-as-trump-cuts-research-funding>
11. Schweinsberg, M., Petrowsky, H. M., Funk, B., & Loschelder, D. D. (2023). Understanding the first-offer conundrum: How buyer offers impact sale price and impasse risk in 26 million eBay negotiations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(32). <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218582120>
12. Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., & Proudman, V. (2021). OA diamond journals study. Part 1: Findings. Zenodo. <https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.4558703>
13. Nash, J. (2024, December 18). The updated Gates Foundation Open Access mandate – what you need to know. Gates Open Research Blog. <https://blog.gatesopenresearch.org/2024/12/18/the-updated-gates-foundation-open-access-mandate-what-you-need-to-know/>
14. Coalition S. (2020). Making full and immediate Open Access a reality. Coalition S. <https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/271118cOAlitionSGuidance.pdf>